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The article below from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by eccx@mindspring.com.
Hmmm.... The NY Times is pretty interesting as far as music goes lately. I'm not
sure if this article as in last week's magazine section or this week's.
Ed
eccx@mindspring.com
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The Industry Standard
October 3, 2004
By RUSSELL SHORTO
A story about music could do worse than to begin at
Carnegie Hall. We're here for a little night music -- or
rather, more than a little. The plan is to see three
performers this evening, and the complication that two of
them will be appearing on different stages at the same time
only adds the spice of challenge. We reach our seats in
Zankel Hall, a newly built, smallish, ultramodern
performance space, just as Audra McDonald takes the stage.
She's a singer who moves easily between musicals and
serious classical soprano roles, and tonight she's in a
slinky black gown, accompanied by a six-piece band, to
perform ''The Seven Deadly Sins,'' a set of Broadway-style
songs, each one written by a different prominent
composer-lyricist team. The music is witty, sultry and
poised, with McDonald seated on a stool torch-singer-style,
chatting and joking between songs with her
no-less-elegantly attired audience. We stay for the first
five sins, then duck out after Sloth and vault up the
staircase to find that the stately and storied main hall
has come undone, 2,800 people rocking, conga lines going up
and down the aisles. David Byrne is onstage, backed by a
rock band and a full string section. The former Talking
Heads singer and longtime impresario of eclectic pop is
dressed all in brown with white shoes, and the music moves
from Talking Heads' nervous anthem ''Psycho Killer'' to an
aria from ''La Traviata'' that he introduces by saying,
''This is a song by an Italian songwriter, Giuseppe
Verdi.''
Once again we have to duck out before the set ends. On 57th
Street, we pile into taxis and head downtown to experience
music in what, for some of us anyway, is a more familiar
context: surrounded by black matte walls, in a sweaty club,
with the crowd standing body to body, heads bobbing in
unison. The show, at Irving Plaza, is a highly anticipated
performance by Wilco, the sometimes-tortured rock band that
has gotten as much press coverage of its emotional and
artistic struggles as of its records. The music is arty and
pounding and complicated and distorted. The average age of
the audience is probably 20 years younger than McDonald's
but 20 years older than the music industry's target teen
demographic.
Which brings us to the point of our story. What these
disparate artists have in common is a record label. I'm
spending the evening with the staff of Nonesuch Records,
the tiny, vigorously eclectic label, housed on the 24th
floor of a high rise on the Avenue of the Americas in
Manhattan, that has become a kind of American cultural
institution. It has an influence far out of proportion to
its size, and some think it could be a guidepost for a
record industry in desperate need of direction.
One secret to the label's success is the conviction that
the distance between Carnegie Hall and Irving Plaza has
shrunk; that, in an age of category blurring, the fault
lines in the audience are not between genres like
classical, rock and hip-hop, but between sensibilities;
that a person might, depending on his or her mood, put on a
Beethoven symphony, a compilation of Cuban jazz, some urban
rock or a country chanteuse like K. D. Lang. A crucial fact
about that someone is that he or she is likely to be over
the age of 30. Two further facts flow from this, which
Nonesuch exploits: this listener has money to spend on
CD's, and he or she would rather have the packaged product
than snag a few songs off the Internet.
''Nonesuch is piracy-proof,'' the singer Emmylou Harris --
who became the label's first ''adult pop'' signing four
years ago -- said when I asked her to list the things that
set her label apart. ''Their audience actually enjoys
buying a record. When I got into music in my teens, the
album was a thing in itself. It was a whole piece of work
that had a reason to flow the way it did. You weren't
interested in just one or two songs. Nonesuch is still in
the business of supporting album artists.''
The industry as a whole is famously obsessed with youth and
megahits. It's also famously slumping. Between 1997 and
2003, the total number of units sold (CD's, cassettes,
vinyl, etc.) dropped by 25 percent, according to the
Recording Industry Association of America. Critics have
charged the R.I.A.A., a lobbying group for record
companies, with manipulating numbers in order to bolster
its case against music downloading; anyway you look at it,
however, the situation hasn't been pretty. Even the recent,
seemingly surefire tactic by Universal Music Group, the
biggest of the big companies, to slash its wholesale CD
prices by 30 percent, failed to spur business.
Against this backdrop of gloom, Nonesuch stands in trim
statistical relief. Where the big labels often need a
record to hit upward of one million in sales in order to
turn a profit, Nonesuch operates on a different scale and
by a different logic. It has its blockbuster hits --
''Buena Vista Social Club,'' from 1997, is the label's
all-time best seller, with three million records sold --
but it can also do nicely with sales of 100,000, or even
50,000. Of the Warner Music Group's 4,400 employees, a
grand total of 12 make up the entire staff of Nonesuch,
which is a part of WMG's Warner Brothers division. In the
past 20 years, Nonesuch's annual sales have grown from
$750,000 to a reported $35 million. Profits have grown
while the industry has contracted, and 2004 looks to be its
best year yet.
Where it was once seen as a niche classical label, now
eminently innovative musicians of every stripe -- including
those of a certain age, whose stardom has dimmed somewhat
but who still have large followings -- want to come aboard.
David Byrne and K.D. Lang have their first records on the
label this year, and last month it released Brian Wilson's
''Smile,'' the record Wilson began in 1966 with the Beach
Boys and left unfinished until recently. When Nonesuch's
parent corporation folded its Warner Jazz label recently
and told its artists they would be divided among the other
divisions in the company, all those that Nonesuch spoke
with said they wanted to come to the label. (The label has
so far picked up three, including the guitarist Pat
Metheny.) Nonesuch has achieved such cachet that Carnegie
Hall itself wants some of it to rub off: in 2003 the two
entities inaugurated the Nonesuch at Carnegie series,
giving the label's artists the prestige of performing at
the venue and Carnegie a dose of eclectic hipness. In
January, NPR began broadcasting some of the concerts.
It's customary for musicians to gripe about their labels,
yet it's hard to locate a Nonesuch artist with complaints.
And the musicians' contentment and the label's
profitability and critical acclaim have a common root.
''It's a complete oasis in the recording business today,''
said the New Music composer Steve Reich, who has been on
Nonesuch for 20 years. ''It is run honestly and candidly
and on a very simple principle: If Bob likes it, he records
it.''
Bob is Robert Hurwitz, and it would be an exaggeration, but
not too great a one, to say that Nonesuch is Hurwitz. In a
business now largely run by accountants and M.B.A.'s,
Hurwitz is, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, who has made
four records with Nonesuch, ''one of the few left who
practice the making of records as a craft.'' Ara
Guzelimian, Carnegie Hall's artistic adviser, refers to
Hurwitz as ''the man who knows what I'm going to like
next.'' The distinguished classical composer John Adams,
who is perhaps best known for his opera ''Nixon in China,''
compares Hurwitz with ''the great book editors, like
Maxwell Perkins.''
Hurwitz is 55 and has the unshakable calm and
sweet-but-remote smile of a Zen master. He favors
open-collar shirts and wears his hair an inch or so over
the collar. He grew up in Los Angeles in what he describes
as ''a fairly evolved household as far as music was
concerned,'' with piano lessons from age 7 and parents who
sang Cole Porter and Gershwin tunes after work and prowled
L.A. nightclubs to hear the jazz pianist Art Tatum
''probably a hundred times.'' Through the 60's, Hurwitz
studied classical piano while listening to Bob Dylan, John
Coltrane and the Beatles and, as a student at U.C.
Berkeley, working as an usher at the San Francisco
Symphony.
After the hard realization that he would not become a
professional pianist, he traveled to New York in 1971 with
the idea of breaking into the business side and met the
rock journalist Lillian Roxon. ''She gave me a list of 50
people in the music business,'' he said. ''And I literally
called every one of them.'' Out of that came a series of
small jobs, including writing an early press bio for Bruce
Springsteen and liner notes for the Weather Report album
''I Sing the Body Electric.'' He wound up at Columbia
Records, where he became a protege of the German record
producer Manfred Eicher -- who had created the European ECM
label around his own musical tastes, which ran from jazz to
classical. In 1984, Robert Krasnow, then the president of
Elektra Records, chose Hurwitz to run Nonesuch. Hurwitz was
only 34, but Krasnow seemed to believe Hurwitz had the
vision to bring back to life a label that, despite its rich
history, was moribund.
Nonesuch was founded 40 years ago by Jac Holzman, who began
his own fabled career in 1950, at the age of 19, when he
started Elektra Records. After operating Nonesuch as a folk
label -- for a time out of a Bleecker Street storefront --
Holzman soon expanded into rock and pop. Classical records
were priced higher than pop at the time, and it occurred to
Holzman that there was an audience of college students and
others with limited budgets that wasn't being served. For
little money, he got U.S. rights to recordings of Bach and
Mozart by European symphonies; he commissioned groovy art
for the covers that stood out against the traditional
dowdiness of classical records (the early Nonesuch covers
have been given their own art exhibitions), and began
issuing them under the Nonesuch name.
''Classical records went for $5, and I put them out for
$2.50,'' Holzman said. ''I liked $2.50 because it was the
price of a trade paperback.'' The venture took off, selling
800,000 records the first year. When Holzman was in Los
Angeles in 1966 and heard a band at the Whisky a Go-Go
called the Doors, it was the profitability of Nonesuch that
allowed him to offer them a three-record deal and land what
would become Elektra's most famous artist. ''It was a rare
case of classical music funding pop,'' he said.
Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, the label expanded beyond
budget classical when, under the stewardship of a
pioneering producer, Teresa Sterne, it spawned two musical
awakenings. In 1966, a musicologist named David Lewiston
showed up in the company's offices with tapes he'd made of
Indonesian gamelan music while in Bali. The jangly, dreamy
percussion was a totally new sound on the American musical
landscape, and from those tapes Sterne made an album,
''Music From the Morning of the World,'' which became one
of the touchstones of the world-music movement. Soon the
label's Explorers series -- records covering traditional
music from around the globe -- was under way. About the
same time, the pianist Joshua Rifkin approached Sterne
about making new recordings of Scott Joplin's ragtime piano
music. Ragtime had been largely forgotten, and the Nonesuch
records sparked a revival.
This era of free-form creativity came to an end when new
management took over Nonesuch and Sterne was fired. After
five fallow years, Hurwitz came aboard, and almost
immediately began pushing in new directions, ignoring genre
divisions. One of his early signings -- the genre-bending
Brazilian pop singer Caetano Veloso, then unknown in
America but now an international star -- indicated the
change in direction. In rapid succession came the jazz
guitarist Bill Frisell, the tango innovator Astor
Piazzolla, John Adams, Steve Reich, the violinist and
performance artist Laurie Anderson, the saxophonist John
Zorn, the composer Philip Glass, the Gipsy Kings, the
Malian diva Oumuo Sangare, Youssou N'Dour, from Senegal,
the musical-theater composer Adam Guettel, the soprano Dawn
Upshaw and a blizzard of others. ''Bob has enormous
confidence in his taste,'' Glass said. ''He has been able
to create something almost like an art gallery, where there
are certain composers and artists whom he is devoted to
nurturing.''
Though he has lived in Manhattan for more than 30 years,
Hurwitz is still very much a Californian. Having grown up
in a car culture, his preferred venue for serious music
listening is his Audi. On weekends he'll drive north from
his Upper West Side home with a stack of CD's; when the
stack is large he might go as far as Vermont before turning
around. On a six-hour jaunt one Sunday in June, he gave me
a primer in how he listens. The remarkable thing about his
approach to his business is that it's pretty much the polar
opposite of what the music industry at large does. Where
the big labels are often out to copy past success, he looks
for originality. ''I know within three minutes if I'm
listening to something that is truly original and
personally striking,'' he says. ''Sometimes I've heard it
in as little as 30 seconds.'' When he hears something he
likes, he signs it. There is no consultation with a
marketing department or wrestling with higher-ups in the
corporation.
Hurwitz's model does not work by predetermining big sales.
Instead, it depends on the label having built a
relationship with reviewers and others, so that when
Nonesuch releases a new artist, the record is guaranteed at
least a few serious listenings. In 1992, based purely on
Hurwitz's enthusiasm and despite the weak pulse in the
market for classical recordings, the label put out the
third symphony of a little-known Polish composer named
Henryk Gorecki. Others heard what Hurwitz did. A Los
Angeles disk jockey took to playing it daily. Improbably
enough, Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 reached the third spot on
the British pop charts and sold one million copies
worldwide.
That isn't to say the label depends solely on word of
mouth. Nonesuch markets and promotes its product, but it
does so along distinctly nontraditional lines. In 1997,
when it brought out ''Buena Vista Social Club,'' the
recording by the guitarist Ry Cooder of a group of aging
Cuban musicians, the initial expectation was for sales of
100,000 or so. But when Cooder took the musicians to
Amsterdam for a concert, David Bither, the senior vice
president of Nonesuch, says, he felt something in the air
there. ''I said to Ry, 'We have to do this at Carnegie
Hall,' '' he recalled. The label pulled $100,000 together
to produce a one-night show in New York, which became a
major event, with crisscrossing political and musical
currents. The filmmaker Wim Wenders, a friend of Cooder's,
pushed the whole project to another level. Intrigued by the
notion of a universe of old, exuberant musicians who were
unknown to the world outside their island, Wenders
accompanied Cooder on one of his trips to Cuba and took
with him a skeleton film crew. Wenders filmed the Carnegie
Hall concert as the climax of what became a documentary.
While ''Buena Vista'' was unique, even the more typical
promotional strategies that Nonesuch employs run counter to
the mainstream. Commercial radio and MTV -- two touchstones
of the big labels -- aren't even part of the Nonesuch
picture. Instead, the focus is on NPR and college radio.
According to Peter Clancy, the label's vice president of
marketing, the Nonesuch listener is more at home in a
bookstore than a record store; 43 percent of the label's
sales come from Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.
Advertising dollars are spent in publications like Utne
Reader, Harper's, The New Yorker and The New York Review of
Books. Nonesuch musicians who spent long careers in the
wider pop world and have aged out of it say that they feel
a sense of relief at not being thrust into commercial
radio. Most Nonesuch musicians know the sales limits of
their niche; deals are structured around limited risk and
modest expectations. ''They don't try to put you into an
arena in which you can't possibly compete,'' said Emmylou
Harris. ''Instead, they say, 'How can we serve this
artist?' They don't say, 'Let's put a new hat on her.' ''
But how, in this supersized era, does a music company make
money off a record that sells 30,000 copies? ''You
eliminate the major expenses right off the bat,'' said
Hurwitz. ''I can't even remember the last time we did a
video. And you keep your marketing campaign under $50,000.
That will buy you a modest amount of advertising, exposure
in some key retail outlets and a fairly strong publicity
campaign.'' A current case in point is Laura Veirs, a
folk-blues singer from Seattle, whose demo Hurwitz played
for me in his car, and whom the label subsequently signed.
The record, ''Carbon Glacier,'' came out in August. ''We'll
spend a little money to help support the tour,'' he said.
''The record came out first in England, and there was a
good press response there. So if we watch our costs, we can
be successful. Whether it sells 30,000 or 200,000 is
anybody's guess, but we are not exposing ourselves
financially in front.''
The objective is to build an audience. Hurwitz says he
finds it unfathomable that his industry chews up and spits
out accomplished artists with devoted followings when
they're still young. Originality implies evolution, an
artist who is on a journey of exploration. Forging a
relationship, in Hurwitz's reckoning, is by definition a
long-term project -- ideally a lifelong one. Consider, by
way of example, the Kronos Quartet, the experimental,
constantly shape-shifting classical string quartet that is
pretty much the embodiment of avant-garde, and thus the
sort of group most record executives would run to get away
from. ''They were among the first artists I signed,''
Hurwitz said. ''You might think a group like that would
sell a few thousand records, but their best-selling record
sold 400,000 copies, and all told we've sold two and a half
million Kronos records. There's no way you can do that with
a group like Kronos unless you have 20 years to grow the
audience.''
When I suggested to David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet
that this long-term relationship must result in a certain
amount of creative freedom, he cheerily reported that he
currently has no less than 17 album projects at different
stages of development. ''Bob knows about most of them,'' he
said, ''but a few I'll wait and spring on him over
breakfast or something.''
Of course, the green light isn't given to every artist.
Hurwitz is still a businessman, after all, and examples of
Nonesuch artists who have gone by the wayside suggest that
even he works by weighing artistic sensibility against
business concerns. The pianist Fred Hersch, who signed in
1995 but left last year for the small independent label
Palmetto, said that with Nonesuch's shift toward adult pop,
and given his own modest sales record, he understood from
Hurwitz that he would have fewer recording opportunities.
The jazz clarinetist Don Byron praises Hurwitz but
described their relationship, through four records, as
''thorny.'' As he evolved toward what he calls urban music,
Byron said, Hurwitz became less interested.
Hurwitz didn't invent his highly individualistic approach
to his business. In fact, it's a throwback. The great
labels of the 50's and 60's shaped the musical culture
because they relied on one or two driving personalities.
But beginning in the mid-1980's, as music companies
consolidated into ever larger corporate entities, a
streamlined business model took hold, one that views music
as a commodity. What's remarkable is that Hurwitz manages
to keep his autonomy within the corporate structure. In 20
years, he says, he's never been told to drop an artist or
sign an artist. Nonesuch thus functions much like an
independent label, with the crucial distinction that its
position within a major media corporation gives it
distribution and marketing muscle.
Which is not to say that Nonesuch is entirely unique in its
position. The venerable jazz label Blue Note exists within
the vast EMI corporate structure, and its president, Bruce
Lundvall, has an autonomy there similar to Hurwitz's. ''Bob
and I are of the same ilk,'' Lundvall said. ''It's kind of
a rotten business to be in, but we've both been lucky in
that we've both been given the freedom to run the labels as
if they were our own.''
Lundvall has a similar mix of artistically innovative
musicians who sell modestly balanced by the occasional
lightning bolt. Lundvall's biggest burst of lightning --
Norah Jones, whose first album has sold 18 million copies
worldwide -- raises the question of whether this
individualistic approach to running a record label might
actually be smarter than what prevails in the industry.
After all, over the last two years, Blue Note's profits
have reportedly outstripped those of EMI's mainstream pop
labels.
Hurwitz shies away from suggestions that what he is doing
could be applied more broadly. ''In the commercial world we
are really insignificant,'' he said. ''So we are no model
for the broader industry.''
Others, however, disagree. Besides being one of Nonesuch's
biggest name artists, David Byrne is also himself the
founder of a record label -- he started Luaka Bop in 1988
initially to release Brazilian music in the United States
-- and he says that what Nonesuch is doing is precisely
what the industry needs to get it out of its crisis. A
label, he argues, is supposed to be more than a corporate
category: ''It's a curatorial effort, a filter. The people
who are at the head of it want you to trust their judgment,
so that if you like one artist you'll get to know others. A
certain kind of relationship gets established, and it's
based on trust. That's a very different concept from record
labels that go for Top 10 hits. There's no trust there at
all -- it's about that one song. The reason the record
business is in trouble is the things they're selling -- the
hit singles and the physical records -- have become
devalued. If people can get those things for free, what do
the record companies have left? Whereas what's incredibly
valued and needed is the relationship and trust.''
Tom Whalley, chairman and C.E.O. of Warner Brothers Records
and Hurwitz's boss, also seems to feel that the Nonesuch
approach has broader implications. ''At first it made me
jealous, that he could have such a niche point of view and
survive as a label in today's world,'' he said, ''whereas
in a major label my job is in a sense to represent the
entire public's taste. But then I thought, everything on
that label makes sense, and yet it's so eclectic. It made
me believe that you could do this, that his model can be
applied in a larger scale in a general way.''
K. D. Lang, whose first record with Nonesuch came out in
July, put it more simply: ''It seems bizarre that more
people don't get that this is what the business was built
on -- following your taste and supporting musicians. It's
common sense.''
Nonesuch has gone through five corporate takeovers or
reshufflings in Hurwitz's tenure, and after each there is
another conference table at which he must defend his work
before a new set of suits -- which means, of course,
showing profits. Selling records does matter to Hurwitz,
and proof of that is sitting before me in the brick atrium
of the hip Hudson Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, smoking
American Spirits and managing to look both tousled and
freshly showered. Jeff Tweedy, singer, songwriter and
guiding force of Wilco, is a Nonesuch kind of rock star.
His bouts with drugs have been well documented, but with
him you get the feeling that the drug outlet has been a way
to deal with creative demons: that he's as much artist as
rocker.
The story of how Wilco came to Nonesuch is now semifamous
and involves several of the conflicting currents in the
music industry. After making three alt-country albums in
the 1990's for the Reprise label (which is also part of
Warner Brothers), the band, and Tweedy in particular, grew
restless with the music and wanted to push some of the
conventions of the rock song. When Wilco sent its new
record to Reprise, the reactions included words like
''horrible.'' There was lots of distortion in the music,
and no apparent single. It ended with Wilco leaving the
label.
''A lot of thought went into what to do next,'' Tweedy
said. ''We could put out our own record. We could continue
streaming the songs and not bother to sell records at all,
because we'd only really made our money on touring anyway.
Or we could go to an independent label in Chicago, where
the people were friends of ours. We thought those were the
only options. Then we realized that the thing we thought
was dead in the business still exists.''
Nonesuch brought out ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'' in 2002 and
it sold more than 600,000 copies, more than any of the
band's previous CD's, and became a huge critical favorite.
Wilco's second Nonesuch record, ''A Ghost Is Born,'' made
its debut this year at No. 8 on the Billboard chart -- the
first Nonesuch record ever to break the Top 10 -- and has
been getting similarly strong reviews and sales, and now it
looks as if the band, rather than mellowing into a more
modest career phase, is ramping up to another level.
When Tweedy first met with Hurwitz and Bither, Hurwitz's
No. 2, however, he was suspicious of their interest in the
band and the new record. ''I was worried that them wanting
to sign us meant they were forfeiting some of their
highbrow ideals,'' he said, ''that they were feeling the
pressure and wanted to have a token pop act.'' Even after
Hurwitz and Bither assured him that Wilco fit into the
label's roster, Tweedy was nervous, afraid that ''the
modern classical guys on the label would, like, revolt at
us coming in.''
The Nonesuch people had wrestled with the same issue -- how
their foray into adult pop would be seen -- a couple of
years earlier. It was Bither, who has a New Music
background (his first job was at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music) but more of a pop sensibility than Hurwitz, who
pushed for the label to incorporate a pop element. After he
joined Nonesuch 10 years ago, Bither, Hurwitz and the
marketing director, Peter Clancy, began a long conversation
about direction, based on their overall conviction that the
Nonesuch listenership was built on sensibility rather than
genre. They understood there was an opportunity in what
Hurwitz calls ''the collapse of the old-time record
business'' to expand by snatching up selected pop artists
who had fallen between the tectonic plates in the industry.
''There really wasn't a model for this,'' Bither said. ''We
came to the conclusion that the New Music commitment that
has always been a part of the company allowed us to add
rooms onto the house.''
The first new room came in 2000 with the signing of Emmylou
Harris, and her album ''Red Dirt Girl.'' The record was a
departure for her. ''She'd reinvented her sound,'' Bither
said. ''So I was interested because there was freshness and
change.'' It became Harris's most successful record in 20
years. Other pop artists quickly saw what Nonesuch was
doing. ''My signing had to do with the changes in the
label, bringing in Wilco and Emmylou Harris and Magnetic
Fields,'' said David Byrne. ''The major labels seem to have
a hard time realizing that some of us who write pop songs
that are on the edges of the mainstream can still have
large audiences. Plus, when you send Bob and David things
you're working on their responses are musical, not, 'Well,
David, this is a nice song, but I don't know what radio
station is going to play it.' ''
The New York group Magnetic Fields came courting Nonesuch
as they were in the process of bursting out of the downtown
scene. Hurwitz loved their somber but almost pathologically
tuneful songs, and while their orientation is pop, the arch
sensibility and instrumentation that includes cello,
harpsichord and banjo are pure Nonesuch. Their first record
with the label, ''i,'' was met with prominent reviews in
Time and Newsweek and extensive college radio play.
Promotion of the CD included creating a 12-inch vinyl dance
remix of one of the songs, which went out to nightclubs.
It's a safe bet that Henryk Gorecki never got that
treatment, but while the label is wading deeper into pop
waters, Hurwitz takes pains to point out his continued
commitment to other types of music: in the pipeline are two
Chinese operas plus works by John Adams and Steve Reich.
Hurwitz also wants to keep a foothold in the traditional
classical world, as evidenced by his ongoing relationships
with Dawn Upshaw, the pianist Richard Goode, the violinist
Gidon Kremer and the mezzosoprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
When I first met Hurwitz in May it had only been two
months since the latest corporate shuffle (Time Warner sold
Warner Music Group to a group of private investors led by
Edgar Bronfman Jr., the former chief of Seagram, which
owned Universal Music Group), and he was anxious about how
a new management team would view his fief. He flew to
Miami, where the heads of all the WMG labels gathered with
the new owners. He was quickly reassured, he said. After
his presentation of the new Nonesuch releases, several
people in the room not only praised his work but also
quietly asked him for CD's for their own collections.
Hurwitz smiled relating this -- it has happened before in
these corporate powwows -- and he divulged what may be his
ultimate secret weapon for surviving in the corporate music
world. ''The fact is, the people in these meetings, the
people who run the music business, are in their 30's, 40's
and 50's,'' he said. ''Their job is to make music for kids.
But I'm making music for the other people in the room.''
Russell Shorto is a contributing writer and the author,
most recently, of ''The Island at the Center of the
World.'
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